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A recent Washington Post analysis has argued that political events as diverse as the Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump can be explained by a “revolt” of the world’s economic “losers.”

Before proceeding, it is important to keep in mind that all income groups in the world have seen gains in real income over the last few decades. That said, some have gained more than others. Between 1988 and 2008, for example, the lowest gains were made by people whose incomes fit beteen the world’s 75th to 90th income percentiles. That includes much of the middle and working class in rich countries.

The Washington Post calls the people in this group the bitter “losers” of globalization. But, are they?

There are at least two problems with characterizing such people as “losers.” First, it seems to suggest that income growth rate matters more than absolute income level. Yet a person in the 80th income percentile globally would not want to trade places with or envy someone in the bottom 10th percentile, despite the latter’s much higher income growth rate.

Consider real GDP per person, adjusted for differences in purchasing power, in China and the United States. Between 1988 and 2008, China’s per person GDP grew by over 340 percent. America’s per person GDP, in contrast, grew by “only” 40 percent. China may be making gains more quickly, but it would be wrong to argue that the United States was a “loser,” for American GDP per person in 2008 was $52,704 and China’s $8,104.

Poor countries are seeing faster income gains partially because their starting point is so much lower—it’s a lot easier to double per person GDP from $1,000 to $2,000 than from $40,000 to $80,000.

The second problem is that the Washington Post piece suggests that the incredible escape from poverty that has occurred in poor countries during my lifetime has come at the expense of the middle classes in the developed world. (This is a fascinating reversal of the more popular, but equally inaccurate, opinion that the Western riches came at the expense of poor countries).

Thus, the Washington Post piece claims, “global capitalism didn’t always work so well for workers in the United States and Europe even as—or, in some cases, because [emphasis mine]—it pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty everywhere else.”

When trying to understand the “winners” and “losers” of globalization, it is important that we do not compare income growth rates over the last few decades with some imagined ideal. Instead, we should compare income growth to what would have happened in a world without globalized trade. In such a world, hundreds of millions of people would have remained in extreme poverty. And the middle class of the developed world would also have made fewer gains. Just look at the amazing reduction in price of consumer goods that we have collected at HumanProgress.

A few individuals in select industries would benefit from protectionism, like the U.S. sugar industry does now. But on average everyone would be poorer, just as in 2013 Americans collectively paid 1.4 billion dollars more for sugar than they would have without protectionism. (The U.S. manufacturing industry, it may be worth noting, would not be among the “select industries” to benefit—most manufacturing job losses have come from mechanization rather than outsourcing, and have been offset by new jobs in other sectors).

Roger Milliken, head of the South Carolina textile firm Milliken & Co. for more than 50 years, was one of the most important benefactors of modern conservatism. He was active in the Goldwater campaign, and was a founder and funder of National Review and the Heritage Foundation. He dabbled in libertarianism, too. He was a board member of the Foundation for Economic Education and supported the legendary anarchist-libertarian speaker Robert LeFevre, sending his executives to LeFevre’s classes.

But he parted company with his free-market friends on one issue: free trade. Starting in the 1980s, when Americans started buying a lot of textile imports, he hated it. As the Wall Street Journal reports today,

Milliken & Co., one of the largest U.S. textile makers, has been on the front lines of nearly every recent battle to defeat free-trade legislation. It has financed activists, backed like-minded lawmakers and helped build a coalition of right and left-wing opponents of free trade….

“Roger Milliken was likely the largest single investor in the anti-trade movement for many years—as though no amount of money was too much,” said former Clinton administration U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky, who battled with him and his allies….

Mr. Milliken, a Republican, invited anti-free-trade activists of all stripes to dinners on Capitol Hill. The coalition was secretive about their meetings, dubbing themselves the No-Name Coalition.

Several people who attended the dinners, which continued through the mid-2000s, recall how International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union lobbyist Evelyn Dubrow, a firebrand four years younger than the elderly Mr. Milliken, would greet the textile boss, who fought to keep unions out of his factories, with a kiss on the cheek.

“He had this uncanny convening power,” says Lori Wallach, an anti-free-trade activist who works for Public Citizen, a group that lobbies on consumer issues. “He could assemble people who would otherwise turn into salt if they were in the same room.”…

“He was just about the only genuinely big money that was active in funding trade-policy critics,” says Alan Tonelson, a former senior researcher at the educational arm of the U.S. Business and Industry Council, a group that opposed trade pacts.

But the world has changed, and so has Milliken & Co. Roger Milliken died in 2010, at age 95 still the chairman of the company his grandfather founded. His chosen successor, Joseph Salley, wants Milliken to be part of the global economy. He has ended the company’s support for protectionism and slashed its lobbying budget. And as the Journal reports, Milliken’s executives are urging Congress to support fast-track authority for President Obama.

At USA Today, I write about Scottish independence, which the Scottish people will vote on this coming Thursday. I note that the late Nobel laureate Gary Becker wrote in 2005, like Simon Lester today, that the disadvantages of small nations are much reduced in a world of free trade:

My conclusion is that developments in the global economy during the past 50 years have greatly reduced the economic disadvantages of small nations enumerated for his time by Hamilton. In fact, being small now may even have efficiency advantages…. [As trade barriers have come down over the past half-century,] small countries can now gain the advantages of large markets through trading with other nations.

I go over arguments on currency, tax rates, and the likelihood that an independent Scotland could be as socialist as some of its political leaders would like if it has to create its own prosperity. In the end, I write:

In any case, the economic arguments will go on till the vote on September 18. Scotland certainly has the elements necessary to be a successful European country. The real question is whether the Scots themselves desire, to borrow an Irish anthem, “that Scotland long a province be/A nation once again.” As a descendant of Scots who helped America secure its independence, I hope so.

So Burger King plans to purchase Canadian doughnut icon Tim Hortons and move company headquarters north of the border, where corporate tax rates are as much as 15 percentage points lower than in the United States. Expect politicians at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to accuse Burger King of treachery, while spewing campaign-season pledges to penalize these greedy, “Benedict Arnold” companies.

If the acquisition comes to fruition and ultimately involves a corporate “inversion,” consider it not a problem, but a symptom of a problem. The real problem is that U.S. policymakers inadequately grasp that we live in a globalized economy, where capital is mobile and products and services can be produced and delivered almost anywhere in the world, and where value is created by efficiently combining inputs and processes from multiple countries. Globalization means that public policies are on trial and that policymakers have to get off their duffs and compete with most every other country in the world to attract investment, which flows to the jurisdictions where it is most productive and, crucially, most welcome to be put to productive use.

Too many policymakers still believe that since the United States is the world’s largest market, U.S.-headquartered companies are tethered to the U.S. economy and committed to investing, hiring, and producing in the United States, regardless of the quality of the business and policy environments. They fail to appreciate how quickly the demographics are changing or that a growing number of currently U.S.-based companies do not share their view. Perhaps too many are unaware of how the United States continues to slide in the various global rankings of attributes that attract business and investment. The leverage politicians have over America’s corporate wealth creators has diminished.

Like too many other long-reigning fixtures on Capitol Hill, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) doesn’t appreciate the magnitude of the challenge to the authority he presumes to hold over America’s job and wealth creators. Or maybe he does, and frustration over that fact explains why he besmirches companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard.

Levin presided over a Senate hearing last week devoted to examining the “loopholes and gimmicks” used by these multinational companies to avoid paying taxes – and to branding them dirty tax scofflaws. Well here’s a news flash for the senator: incentives matter.

The byzantine U.S. tax code, which Senator Levin – over his 33-year tenure in the U.S. Senate (one-third of a century!) – no doubt had a hand or two in shaping, includes the highest corporate income tax rate among all of the world’s industrialized countries and the unusual requirement that profits earned abroad by U.S. multinationals are subject to U.S. taxation upon repatriation. No other major economy does that. Who in their right minds would not expect those incentives to encourage moving production off shore and keeping profits there?

Minimizing exposure to taxes – like avoiding an oncoming truck – is a natural reaction to tax policy. Entire software and accounting industries exist to serve that specific objective. Unless they are illegal (and that is not what Levin asserts directly), the tax minimization programs employed at Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard are legitimate responses to the tax policies implemented and foreshadowed by this and previous congresses. If Levin is concerned about diminishing federal tax collections from corporations (which, of course, reduces his power), the solution is to change the incentives – to change the convoluted artifice of backroom politics that is our present tax code.

Combine the current tax incentive structure with stifling, redundant environmental, financial, and health and safety regulations, an out-of-control tort system that often starts with a presumption of corporate malfeasance, exploding health care costs, and costly worker’s compensation rules, and it becomes apparent why more and more businesses would consider moving operations abroad – permanently. Thanks to the progressive trends of globalization, liberalization, transportation, and communication, societies’ producers are no longer quite as captive to confiscatory or otherwise suffocating domestic policies. They have choices.

Of course many choose to stay, and for good reason. We are fortunate to have the institutions, the rule of law, deep and diversified capital markets, excellent research universities, a highly-skilled workforce, cultural diversity, and a society that not only tolerates but encourages dissent, and the world’s largest consumer market – still. Success is more likely to be achieved in an environment with those advantages. They are the ingredients of our ingenuity, our innovativeness, our willingness to take risks as entrepreneurs, and our economic success. This is why companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Hewlett-Packard are born in the United States.

But those advantages are eroding.

While U.S. policymakers browbeat U.S. companies and threaten them with sanctions for “shipping jobs overseas” or “hiding profits abroad” or some other manifestation of what politicians like to call corporate greed, characterizing them as a scourge to be contained and controlled, other governments are hungry for the benefits those companies can provide their people. Some of those governments seem to recognize that the world’s wealth and jobs creators have choices about where they produce, sell, and conduct research and development. And some are acting to attract U.S. businesses with incentives that become less necessary every time a politician vents his spleen about evil corporations. Not only should our wealth creators be treated with greater respect from Washington, but we are kidding ourselves if we think our policies don’t need to keep up. As I wrote in a December 2009 Cato paper:

Governments are competing for investment and talent, which both tend to flow to jurisdictions where the rule of law is clear and abided; where there is greater certainty to the business and political climate; where the specter of asset expropriation is negligible; where physical and administrative infrastructure is in good shape; where the local work force is productive; where there are limited physical, political, and administrative friction.

This global competition in policy is a positive development. But U.S. policymakers cannot take for granted that traditional U.S. strengths will be enough. We have to compete and earn our share with good policies. The decisions made now with respect to policies on immigration, education, energy, trade, entitlements, taxes, and the role of government in managing the economy will determine the health, competitiveness, and relative significance of the U.S. economy in the decades ahead.

Since another hearing devoted to thanking these companies for their contriubtions to the U.S. economy is unlikely, perhaps Senator Levin should at least consider the perils of chasing away these golden geese.

In 1980 Milton Friedman made a splash with his 10-part PBS documentary, Free to Choose, which also became a bestselling book. Thirty years later Cato senior fellow Johan Norberg travels in Friedman’s footsteps to see what has actually happened in those places Friedman’s ideas helped transform. From Stockholm to Estonia to India, from New York to Hong Kong to Chile and Washington, D.C., Norberg examines the contemporary relevance of Friedman’s ideas in the 2011 world of globalization and financial crisis. The result is a one-hour documentary, Free or Equal: A Personal View, which is now running on PBS stations across the country.

Visit the Free to Choose Network page to find out more about the documentary. Click on “Carriage Grid” to find showings in your area. Note that it’s arranged by size of media market, so New York is first, then Los Angeles, and so on down through 210 media markets. It’s searchable.

I missed the first Washington showing on Sunday, so check it out today. But note that showings will run into mid-September, so your friends will have many chances to catch the show.

Who knows more about inflation, Richard Galanti or Ben Bernanke? I maintain that, when it comes to the facts, Mr. Galanti knows more than the Fed chairman. Galanti is the CFO of Costco Wholesale Corp.

The Wall Street Journalreported last Thursday (May 26th) on a conference call with Mr. Galanti. He said “we saw quite a bit of inflationary pricing” in the 3rd quarter.

Price increases occurred in a broad range of products” dry dog food (3.5%). Detergents (10%+), plastic products (8-9%). Costco will “hold prices as long as we can.” When it can no longer, the consumer will face rising prices.

Costco is a good leading indicator of inflation at the retail level. It turns over inventory quickly, and is leading other retailers in restocking at higher prices. Costco offers a forward-looking view of consumer price inflation.

Meanwhile the Fed and its chairman, Ben Bernanke, rely on backward looking measures of inflation, like the CPI. That index, and the “core” component that excludes food and energy prices, overweight the depressed housing sector. And they are yesterday’s news.

For years, American consumers have benefitted from cheap imports from China and India. When those countries liberalized and opened up to global commerce, Americans got the benefit of the hard work and low wages of 2 ½ billion workers. The era of cheap labor is coming to an end, and with it the flood of imports that held down prices in the U.S. Especially in China, wage rates are rising rapidly.

Heretofore, the flood of dollars has chiefly affected asset prices and inflation in other countries. The flow through to U.S. consumer prices will now be quicker. You’ll experience it when you go to Costco to restock.